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About twickland

Let's begin with clearing up the terminology. Retrospect stores backup data in Media Sets. The catalog file simply keeps track of the data that is in the Media Set. The greater the number of files, folders, and backups a given Media Set contains, the larger its catalog file will be.
It sounds like you are using a Disk Media Set. It's usually best for the catalog for a Disk Media Set to be stored on a different volume than the data. Grooming enables you to recover space on the data volume by deleting older backups. Keeping the Media Set's catalog file compressed enables you to save space on the disk volume where the catalog file is stored, at the price of whatever performance hit is caused by the need to repeatedly compress and expand the catalog.
I'm curious how large your Media Set is, both in the number of files and in the data itself. 36 GB seems like a pretty big catalog file We use both disk and tape Media Sets to back up 38 source volumes, and for a tape set that has around 25 million files, the catalog file is around 11 GB; for a disk set containing 6 million files, the catalog file is around 9 GB. (We don't keep any of our catalogs compressed.)
As always, the more information you can give us about your setup, including OS and software versions, the better we can help.

You may be confusing a backup set with the tape members of that backup set, as none of the screenshots above show any actual tape members.
Your third screenshot above shows that Retrospect is aware of six backup sets. You can highlight any or all of them to search for your files of interest. You can also open more catalog files and search them as well.
I can't say what limitations, if any, that Retrospect 5.1 may have regarding how many backup set catalogs that it can be aware of and search through in one go. That may depend on how many tape members are in each backup set, as well as the total count of files in the backups. As David notes above, having a backup set's catalog is not useful if you don't actually have the tape members of that backup set.
In your next post, please give us an idea of how many tape members there are in a typical backup set of yours. You can find this by going to Configure>Backup Sets>Configure [specific backup set]>Members.

Retrospect stores its data in backup sets. A tape backup set can have many members. The information about what data is in the backup set and how many members it has are located in the backup set's catalog. The Retro.config file does not contain this information, though it does track where the catalogs are stored.
If the catalog(s) is/are missing or corrupt, you'll need to rebuild it/them. However, if they are still on an accessible disk volume, you should be able to get Retrospect to see them simply by double-clicking on the catalog file in Finder.

Grooming will occur according to the parameters you have set. It will only remove backups that are outside the range set to be retained. It sounds like you may be retaining more backups than you thought. Remember that there is a separate backup for each volume or favorite folder you have included as a source, so the total number of individual backups will be the number of sources times the number of backups to be retained.
In general, grooming is most effective when you have only a single drive volume in your disk media set. That's because grooming will remove unwanted backups from all the media set's members, but the only free space available for writing to will be on the last member.
Go to Media Sets> Members and click on the plus sign at the bottom of the window. Remember, though, that if adding this member does permit grooming according to your current settings, it's likely that what gets groomed out will be from an earlier member and if so, the freed-up space will be unavailable.

If, as it sounds, your backups are completing successfully, I'd be inclined to ignore the [*] soccClose: shutdown() failed with error X messages. We see those from time to time at the completion of a backup activity when there is no apparent problem. You should, of course, confirm that you can restore everything from your backups before deciding that they really ran successfully.
My response in the post that David Hertzberg cites above was related to the fact that the scheduled backups did not run.

Once Retrospect has gone on to a new member, there is no way to add data to a previous member. The only way to reuse the tapes without losing the data would be to copy the existing data to a new or different media set.
If you are going to copy directly from one tape media set to another, you need to have two tape drives. Of you have only one drive, you would need to copy to a disk (or other non-tape) media set, and then copy from that set to the tape set.
You didn't say how many full tape members you have in this media set. To save time, you could get by with only consolidating the data from the short members, if you know when you began to write to the first short member, and copy only the data from that time forward to a new disk media set. You would then mark all of the short members as "missing" and copy the data from the disk media set to an erased tape, which would become the next member of your tape media set.

You should be able to rebuild the catalog for everything that's readable. When Retrospect encounters trouble reading a tape, it will ask if you want to save the partial rebuild; you should say yes. Then, select the same media set, but instead of clicking on "rebuild," click "repair," and insert the next available tape member. Continue until no more tape members are available.
Without a catalog, Retrospect has no way of knowing in advance how many members there are in the media set, and will just ask for them sequentially. When it asks for member tape 6 during the rebuild, simply click "missing" and insert tape 7. Or, you could try to read whatever data you can from tape 6, and then follow the steps I outlined above.
Yes. You will just need to click "missing" when Retrospect asks for members 1, 2, and 3.
AFIK, no.

What selection parameters are you using in your Copy Backups script? Is there any possibility these may have changed recently?
Do you obtain any different results if you try running a Copy Media Set script rather than a Copy Backups script?
If you do a verify, I'd select the option "Verify entire media set." In my experience, a verify operation either does not recognize bad media set headers or it ignores them, as they are not noted in the log.
My biggest concern is the bad media set errors you're encountering with the tape copies. That suggests something subtle may be amiss with the disk media set, since you are apparently able to restore successfully from that set. If the above suggestions lead nowhere, I'd be inclined to open a support case with Retrospect.

Are you able to refresh or locate the client in the Sources window? Are you performing regular scheduled backups in addition to the proactive backups, and do the scheduled backups run correctly? (If you're not doing this already, try creating and running a regular scheduled backup as a test. You will get an error message if the backup fails, which could help in your diagnosis.)
Are the problem clients located in a different subnet than the clients that back up correctly? How are you attempting to connect with the clients: multicast, subnet broadcast, or direct IP?

The matching/don't add duplicates options are controlled by your backup scripts, and not by the source- or media set configurations. Simply forgetting and re-adding a source will not cause it to be backed up in its entirety (unless, of course, that is what your script had been set to do).

I would try forgetting and then re-adding Media Set A to see if that helps. Go to the Media Sets window, highlight the media set and click "Remove." Then click "Locate" and navigate to the media set's catalog.

I've recently been seeing thousands of occurrences of the following error message in the operations log:
[*] TLocalVolEnum::NextEnum: UMakePath error -43 on volume brettw
The error messages are interspersed with other normal log entries and don't appear to be associated with any particular Retrospect activity, at least as regards the sequence in which these messages appear relative to the other log entries.
There is no local nor client volume "brettw," though there is such a folder on a mounted server volume and brettw appears as a user on a number of client volumes ("brettw" is the account of one of our IT guys). The name doesn't appear in the Sources list as a volume or a favorite folder.
I know error -43 as a file not found error, not something particular to Retrospect.
Any ideas? Thanks.